Why Corporate Training May Be Less Effective Than Bird Training

by StressLimitAdmin on Monday, May 12, 2008 (post #291)

Flying from Newark to Hong Kong, I indulged myself in catching up on the New Yorker.  This issue (May 12, 2008) was a double-delight, and offered inadvertent insights on corporate training.

I always welcome a new Malcolm Gladwell article—"In the Air: Who Says Big Ideas are Rare?" is on the nature of creativity,  and the frequency with which major scientific inventions are discovered simultaneously by many. (Not just Leibniz and Spinoza with calculus, five people came up with the steamboat, Gladwell says, and 9 invented the telescope at the same time).

Gladwell draws the implication that “genius” can be socially engineered by linking up smart people in a focused manner. Living proof is former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures, which has generated thousands of patentable ideas.

But you can’t over-engineer creativity. Randomness must be given its due. A starting problem and some pre-work seems to be important. Beyond that, the problems that end up being solved may vary radically from the original agenda. People must do their thing for group genius to take hold. Beyond agenda, it’s the confluence of smart people, not the proscribed process, that gets results.

But Gladwell’s piece is not all. The same issue has the amazing story of Alex the parrot, trained for 30 years by the equally impressive scientist, Irene Pepperberg.  Margaret Talbot's article, "Birdbrain: The Woman Behind the World's Chattiest Parrots," begins by reprising our historical view of animal intelligence.

Descartes, Talbot writes, posited a hard line between human intelligence and the “sub-human” view of animals. Darwin threw us back toward anthropomorphism. With B. F. Skinner, we returned to the Cartesian view of animals—but included people as essentially animalistic.

When Alex the parrot came on the scene, he confounded the animal behaviorists. He would initiate conversations, make appropriate comments, ask for things. “Sit on your knee?” You let him. “Scratch my head.” You do. Alex would ask, “You want food?” No. “You want drink?” No. “Then what do you want?”

Call that what you want, Alex was no birdbrain. Alex took conversations past where we’ve gone with chimps and dolphins. But here’s what drove the Skinnerians batty. Alex was not trained through stimulus and reward; he was trained through social interaction. Given classic “push the button get the pellet” training, he learned nothing. But placed in a social setting, competing and interacting with another (bird or human) for a trainer’s social attention, Alex learned rapidly. The author says:

As it happens, the model/rival method may have some utility for another species—humans. Diane Sherman, who works with autistic children in Monterey, California, has had some preliminary success in encourage speech in her clients using Pepperberg’s protocol. In an article published in The International Journal of Comparative Psychology, Sherman and Pepperberg say that, in two studies of children in Shermans private practice, [Pepperberg’s] model/rival method led to “significant gains” in the children’s “communication and social interaction with peers and adults.”

What does this have to do with corporate training, you ask?  At the risk of offending a few valued readers, let me make an overly broad generalization.  Corporate training is one example of a corporate trend toward breaking things down into parts and parceling them out.  That's the pattern of outsourcing, of decentralization, of measuring outcomes, of securitization and disintermediation in the mortgage industry. 

These corporate trends are not all bad.  "Breaking it down and parceling it out" sounds like time-honored specialization and division of labor.  Division of labor is a recipe for efficiency. But we often lose sight of a holistic perspective and objectives. In training, this often means choosing training over education, sacrificing learning in the pursuit of behavior. Judging by outcomes, curriculum designers long ago ditched John Dewey in favor of B.F. Skinner.

In the corporate training world, every program has cascading objectives—overall, daily, and module-specific. Each “objective” is typically phrased in terms of behaviors: “participants will learn the skills and behaviors associated with….”

Can you imagine going to church or synagogue and being given a "spiritual inventory" from which to develop a "gap assessment" and a "needs analysis" followed by a customized program?

"In this class, sinners will learn the behaviors associated with the sixth through tenth commandments; participants will learn not to kill, and will no longer covet… Pre-requisite course: commandments 1 through 5."

Myhrvold’s lesson—underscored by Gladwell—is that objectives work at the level of agenda, participants, and pre-reading. Programming creativity below that level of specificity just kills it. Yet a modern trainer would be shot for proposing a program as open-ended as Myhrvold’s. In module design, an exercise yielding such varied outcomes would be tightened, trimmed, focused so that it produces replicable, predictable results—eerily called “learnings.”

The story of Alex the parrot tells us the same thing. Put me in a cage, appeal to my lowest level—peanuts and M&Ms—but you’ll get nothing from me unless you keep me starving. Give me the richness of social stimulation, give me some control over what I learn and how, and I will astound you with what “even” a bird can learn.

Talbot’s article has this poignant section about a famous research chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky who had learned sign language:

After Nim had been retired to a Texas ranch where most of the employees didn’t know sign language, he continued to sign. When Bob Ingersoll, an old teacher of Nim’s, came to visit him the chimp, who was in a cage at the time, eagerly signed “Bob,” “out,” and “key.”

Even a chimp doesn’t like being processed.

Is "Brand Trust" An Oxymoron?

by Charles H. Green on Friday, May 9, 2008 (post #290)

I’ve long meant to write about trust and branding. I don’t pretend to have the last word on this subject, but I don’t think the first words have said enough yet.

What triggered this article was several conversations with Steve Cranford at Whisper, and in particular, his recent post on great branding through through truth-telling.

What’s the difference between trust and branding? Or are they the same? Is Brand Trust an intuitively meaningful term? Or an oxymoron?

My answer is, “It depends.” The harder question is answering the follow-up: “On what?”

I have argued that the predominant sense of the word “trust” is personal, not institutional. My frame of reference is not dictionaries but real world usage.

But if it is true that trust is personal and not institutional,  doesn't that mean that branding can’t be very trust-powerful, because it doesn’t deal in the interpersonal? Branding is mainly about an individual relating to an institution, a company, a product. Not a person. In fact, the reason the term “personal brand” caught on as a term is that it feels like an oxymoron, a paradox, a conflation—and we are intrigued by such formulations.

But hold on a minute.  Let's consider branding in terms of the Trust Equation: a mix of credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation.  Just because branding doesn't employ all of the elements of trust,  that doesn't mean your brand can't heavily leverage a few components and arguably out-trust an individual.

What does the brand McDonald’s imply? For one thing, reliability. Huge, massive levels of reliability regarding the things you put into your body, the places you interact with people to buy those things, and the consistency of experience. You know what you’re going to get at McDonald's, and are rarely, rarely disappointed.

That’s worth a helluva lot. And on one critical element of trust, arguably that level of reliability—at least in the sense of being predictable—is as powerful as reliability exhibited by a friend.

Take another trust component—credibility. How much more will you pay for Poland Spring than for a store chain’s house brand? A fair amount. But how much will you pay for the latter compared to an un-labeled bottle of water sold by a street vendor? Massively multiples more, because credibility is something we care about when our health is at stake, and the credibility of a retail chain vastly exceeds that of street vendors when it comes to the life-sustaining fluid that is water.

On the face of it, the other two elements of the Trust Equation—intimacy and self-orientation—are inherently personal attributes, not corporate or product-related. We don’t share our feelings with a brand, or worry that our brand is self-focused and not paying enough attention to us. That would be silly.

Or would it?

Cranford argues that "telling the truth—authenticity—is one more requirement of effective branding."

What he's getting at—as I see it—is revealed in Cranford's definition of branding: "defining why you are, so that you become the only logical choice for what you offer."

I think Cranford is on to something. We often speak of branding as an objective characteristic of a product or service offering, or as the subjective experience of customers presented over time with that product or service offerings.

But people don’t “trust” products. They don’t “trust” service offerings. They trust people. As Cranford notes, 75% of the American people don’t trust advertising or advertisers.

But they do trust people. So, the real question becomes: do we or do we not trust the people behind the brand? Do we believe in the integrity of the organization putting out the product or service? Do those people in that company really believe what they say? Do they mean for their product to serve us? Or could they just as well be in currency trading or reinsurance as well as whatever they’re doing, because they’re just in it for the money?

That makes sense to me. In the traditional, personal sense of trust, I trust a brand because of what I believe about the people branding it.

If you're sufficiently old, you'll remember, “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star—the big, bright, Texaco star.” Not anymore. And not for lack of money spent on branding gasoline. But because we no longer believe we can "trust our car" to the people running, say, Chevron (or Exxon). Station owner? Maybe. Company? I don't think so. Strong brand? Yes. Trusted? Not so much.

But, Enterprise Rent-a-Car? Yes to both questions. Starbucks? Pretty much so, still, despite growing pains.

Branding may be the social version of the individual connection we call trust. It's accesibly meaningful in narrow senses like reliability. And, it can have that personal meaning when it comes to the authenticity and trustworthiness of those behind the curtain—the ones charged with delivering the brand.

Those are my thoughts. Ad and PR people? Branding people? Psychologists? Coaches? Marketers? Or just armchair theorists—what do you all think?

How to Increase Trust by Getting Off Your "S"

by Charles H. Green on Thursday, May 8, 2008 (post #289)

What’s the single best way to become trusted? Is it to increase:

• Your expertise?
• Your communications skills?
• Your credentials?
• Industry knowledge?
• Interpersonal skills?
• Empathy?
• Your appearance?

According to the Trust Equation, it is to decrease your self-orientation.

The Trust Equation is T = (C + R + I) / S , where C stands for credibility, R for reliability, I for intimacy, and S for self-orientation. (Read more about the Trust Equation at Trust: The Core Concepts.)

Note the equation itself posits the S factor as the most powerful by virtue of its solo location in the denominator. High self-orientation decreases trustworthiness, by the formula; low self-orientation increases it.

Self-orientation comes in two flavors. The first is selfishness: a sense by the other person that you are in it for yourself, not for them. The classic stereotype of the conniving salesman fits this version of S; so do con artists. And, for the most part, infants.

But the more common version of self-orientation—the daily, garden variety, neurotic form—is simply an inability to get out of one’s own way, a tendency to see others’ actions in terms of their impact on us, a constant worry about how others perceive us, a concern that others are talking about us—or, perhaps, that they’re not talking about us.

What happens when we’re preoccupied by the noises between our ears? We are unable to connect with others, unable to hear them, and therefore unable to genuinely convince others that they have been heard by us.

• When presenting in front of groups, high S traps us in our own fear—we look preoccupied, and don’t connect with the audience.
• When in a sales call, high S means we are pretending to listen—faking head-nods and non-verbal verbal’s—all the while focused on planning what we’ll say when the other person stops talking. And the customer knows it.
• When advising a friend or co-worker, high S manifests in recasting the other’s situation into our own historical frames of reference, rather than devoting ourselves seeing the other’s viewpoint.
• When in a romantic or parental relationship, high S manifests as annoyingly controlling, as acting against an implicit promise of commitment to the other.

How to improve trust? Get off your S.

(Thanks to Andrea Howe and Byron Hanson for the catch phrase).

Focus on others. Do things for other people. Get curious about people around you. Listen. Learn to love silent pauses. Stop matching others’ vignettes with toppers of your own. Give up trying to control others. Live in the process, not the outcome. Recast your advice as simply your own experiences. Serve others. If it’s the right thing to do, recommend a competitor. Put a quarter in a stranger’s parking meter and move along.

Paradoxically, stop trying to get people to trust you. Just put your time where it can most help others. Paradoxical, because a byproduct will be that others trust you. Because you have become trustworthy. Worthy of trust.

Get off your S.

To measure your own level of self-orientation and learn how to improve your trust quotient, go to my free online self-assessment, the Trust Quotient Self-Diagnostic.